Will Arjun Mk 1A be the Last of the Series?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on 13 February, handed over the indigenous main battle tank (MBT) Arjun Mk-1A, to the Army at Chennai.
“We will continue working to make our armed forces one of the most modern forces in the world. At the same time, the focus on making India Atmanirbhar (self-reliant) in the defence sector moves with full speed,” the Prime Minister said at the event.
The state-of-the-art main battle tank has been indigenously designed, developed and manufactured by Chennai-based Combat Vehicles Research & Development Establishment (CVRDE), a unit of the Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO), along with 15 academic institutions, eight labs and several micro, small & medium enterprises (MSME).
With modern battle tank technologies, Arjun MBT Mk-1A is distinct from the contemporary MBT and is a dependable war-fighting machine. It is a weapon platform with superior firepower, high mobility, excellent protection and crew comfort with 14 major upgrades on Arjun MBT Mk-1, according to the CVRDE.
About the Arjun MBT
The Arjun MBT project was initiated by DRDO in 1972 with the CVRDE as its lead laboratory. The objective was to create a “state-of-the-art tank with superior fire power, high mobility, and excellent protection.” During the development, the CVRDE achieved breakthroughs in the engine, transmission, hydropneumatic suspension, hull and turret as well as the gun control system. Mass production began in 1996 at the Indian Ordnance Factory’s production facility in Avadi, Tamil Nadu.
The Indian Army received the first batch of 16 tanks in 2004 and they were inducted as a squadron of the 43 Armoured Regiment. In 2009, the first Arjun regiment of the Indian Army had 45 tanks. By 2011, over 100 tanks had been delivered. In 2010, the Indian army ordered another 124 Arjuns. The Ministry of Defence ordered another 118 units of the Arjun Mk-1A. These are the units being inducted now at a revised cost of over Rs 8,400 crore.
Main Features
The Arjun tanks stand out for their 120-mm calibre rifled gun. It also has a computer-controlled integrated fire control system with stabilised sighting that works in all lighting conditions. The secondary weapons include a co-axial 7.62-mm machine gun for anti-personnel and a 12.7-mm machine gun for anti-aircraft and ground targets.
The Mk-1A version has 14 major upgrades on the earlier version. It is also supposed to have missile firing capability as per the design, but this feature will be added later as final testing of the capability is still on. However, the biggest achievement with the latest version is 54.3 per cent indigenous content against the 41 per cent in the earlier model.
Initial Reluctance
Before operating Arjun, for a long time, the Indian Army operated Russian tanks with the Russian design philosophy of three-man crew with an auto-loader. Indian tank crews, tank commanders and the armoured corps made its strategies and tactics keeping the Russian tanks in mind also addressing the shortcomings of the autoloader. Implementing them on Heavy tanks based on western design would be quite challenging. This was the most significant reason behind the army’s reluctance.
Inducting such heavy tanks like Arjun will create logistic problems but this is not something which should prevent the army from buying these in large numbers. The army just needs to invest in carriages capable of carrying heavier loads.
Arjun is very well suited for the Western borders. It can outperform any other tank in that terrain. But now after the Ladakh standoff Army’s primary focus has shifted to China. The lighter tanks like the T-90 give a broader spectrum for deployment.
India is one of the largest operators of the Russian T-90. Thus, there are import lobbyists inside Indian committees which decide which tank to procure.
Technically speaking, the Army has no reason to be unhappy with the Arjun tank, as its senior officers had given the clearance more than a year ago after the MBT had undergone numerous trials. The tank comes with with 14 major improvements that the Army had sought.
Compared to its earlier version Arjun Mk 1, the Mark 1A boasts an improved gunner sight (a 120mm main gun), fitted with automated target tracking capabilities. This allows the tank’s crew to locate and track mobile targets automatically, enabling attack even when the MBT is moving.
It also incorporates day-and-night stabilized sights. Besides, it is integrated with thermobaric and penetration-cum-blast ammunition, in addition to the conventional fin-stabilized armor-piercing discarding sabot and high explosive squash head ammunition.
Arjun Mark 1A can run at a maximum road speed of 58 km/h and 40 km/h in cross country with a maximum cruising range of 500 km. It can negotiate a gradient of 30% and a vertical step of 910 mm. It can cross natural or man-made trenches 2,430 mm wide. The tank can cross a water obstacle of 1.4 m depth without preparation and 2.15 m with a kit.
At the same time, it is being said that this would be the last of the 68-ton Arjun series. The Army has placed a Rs 20,000 crore order for the manufacture of 464 T-90MS standard tanks to add to the 1,191 Bhishma tanks already inducted.
Not-so-rosy History
The Arjun has seen numerous changes in design and been over-budget with long delays. It was planned in 1972 and the DRDO started the work on it in 1974. It was to be a 40-ton vehicle, small enough to be strategically mobile and capable of being shuttled on internal lines (roads and railroads) to the borders.
But when in 2009, 35 years after it was originally conceived, Arjun was “ready” for production, its weight turned out to be 62 tons. It had other shortcomings too, which the Army did point out.
And yet, the Army was persuaded (pressured?) to buy 124 of them, with the last batch being procured in 2013. However, by mid-2015, two years after the purchase was complete, nearly 75 percent of the Arjun force was inoperable due to technical problems.
A 2016 report from the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) noted that most of the tanks had not been in operation since 2013 due to a lack of spare parts. And the DRDO, in 2017, informed that it had imported spare parts to repair any faults that had sidelined 75 per cent of the Arjun tanks
Side by side, all these years (after 2010), the DRDO declared that it would work for Arjun 2 where many shortcomings of the Arjun 1 would be rectified with additional features. In 2014, the Union Cabinet decided to procure 118 of these, but the proposal was formally cleared by the DAC (Defence Acquisition Council) only in 2018, with Arjun 2 being rechristened now as Arjun Mark 1A.
But the Army said that even this version did not meet all its requirements like the ability to fire a missile from its main gun and battlefield management system. Besides, the Army, which had found problems with the 62-ton weight of version 1, had to cope with the 68-ton weight with the latest version of 1A. It was only in 2020 that the Army gave its final “clearance”.
